Electoral College under siege

12/17/12 2:56 PM EST

After an election in which most of the nation served as spectators to a presidential race waged largely in nine swing states, there’s growing momentum behind efforts to rewrite the rules for electing presidents:

On the same day Minnesota's presidential electors will ceremonially cast their votes for President Barack Obama, a bipartisan bunch of Minnesota lawmakers proposed exchanging the power of the Electoral College and making the national popular vote supreme.

The new system, backed by a diverse group of legislators, would give weight to the number of actual votes presidential candidates get, rather than just number of Electoral College votes, in presidential elections. A diverse group of Minnesota backers say it would mean every vote would have equal value during presidential campaigns, removing the candidates' incentive to focus primarily on the handful swing states.

"Everyone understands that places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, swing states, this is a really good process for them right now. Unfortunately, the rest of the country gets hosed," backer Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington, said Monday.

Yet even in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania that actually saw the presidential candidates in 2012, efforts are under way to revamp the rules in a way that could change future outcomes.

Reid Wilson of National Journal writes that Republicans “are preparing an all-out assault on the Electoral College system in critical states”:

Senior Republicans say they will try to leverage their party's majorities in Democratic-leaning states in an effort to end the winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes. Instead, bills that will be introduced in several Democratic states would award electoral votes on a proportional basis.

There’s a sour grapes feel to the GOP efforts, just as there was to the National Popular Vote initiative, which was ostensibly nonpartisan but got its energy from Al Gore’s Electoral College loss in 2000 and has only been enacted in eight of the bluest states and the District of Columbia.

Essentially, the GOP initiative is a concession that big states like Michigan and Pennsylvania are maddeningly out of reach after voting Democratic for president in five consecutive elections.

If those laws are passed, they would have a significant impact on the tactics and strategy of future presidential campaigns — not to mention down-ballot campaigns that stand to be affected for better or worse.